This proposed use of RFID raises some very interesting side issues. The first
is RF pollution / saturation. Are these companies going to by custom RF
ranges (very expensive!) or load the public frequencies?
And with the great numbers of RFID devices that are being proposed, how will
channels be shared? I am doubting that these pieces of paper are going to be
intelligent enough to run some sort of sensing protocol to prevent stepping on
each other's feet.
The network infrastructure is going to need to be impressive. I doubt these
RFIDs have much of a transmission range if they are being powered by RF. Are
stores going to be placing access points on each shelf in a store?
I guess that I really am a geek, since I find the technical challenges to RFID
to be so nifty. As for the ethics of RFID, I will leave that to other posts
on this list!
Can DRM ever work?
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I must agree with your opinion that wrappers are easy to remove. I am amazed that companies continue to attempt to do this. It seems to me that for media to be usable, at some point is must be in a format that my sound card or graphics card can process. At this time I can grab the bit stream and the DRM wrapper is violated.
For something like DRM to really work, you would need to go in and make custom hardware so that users are unable to pull information that is headed in its direction. But this would be a bit of an engineering feat, and hard to sell to the public. So why do this companies keep trying?
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And with the great numbers of RFID devices that are being proposed, how will channels be shared? I am doubting that these pieces of paper are going to be intelligent enough to run some sort of sensing protocol to prevent stepping on each other's feet.
The network infrastructure is going to need to be impressive. I doubt these RFIDs have much of a transmission range if they are being powered by RF. Are stores going to be placing access points on each shelf in a store?
I guess that I really am a geek, since I find the technical challenges to RFID to be so nifty. As for the ethics of RFID, I will leave that to other posts on this list!
I must agree with your opinion that wrappers are easy to remove. I am amazed that companies continue to attempt to do this. It seems to me that for media to be usable, at some point is must be in a format that my sound card or graphics card can process. At this time I can grab the bit stream and the DRM wrapper is violated. For something like DRM to really work, you would need to go in and make custom hardware so that users are unable to pull information that is headed in its direction. But this would be a bit of an engineering feat, and hard to sell to the public. So why do this companies keep trying?